WHAT IS MASKING SOFTWARE AND WHY DO YOU NEED IT?

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Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Mask painting is the process of cutting out a certain part of an image - foreground or background - and replacing it with something else altogether. The term has becomes widely used since digital photo editing began to open up new vistas in image manipulation - to the extent that the greenscreen is the most common background used while taking commercial photographs today.

The greatest difficulty surrounding cutouts and mask painting is the process of selecting an area with irregular, blurred edges or multiple colors. The best example that I can give of this is a multicolored head of flyaway hair - the photo editor's nightmare.

Intelligent edge detection is a feature built into most photo editors today - Photoshop, GIMP etc. However, the edge detectors find themselves at the limit of their intelligence when faced with soft, blurred or multicolored edges. This is when graphic designers find that 90% of their time spent on a project has been the time spent trying to perfect the edge. The amount of time lost adds up really quickly.
This is where plugins or standalone software that ease up the cutting-out process begin to pay off.

A good masking software should have the following features:


  1. Selection tools that are sensitive to complex, multicolored and blurred edges, and have presets for selecting the most common complex background objects - trees, hair, lattices.

  2. Customizable edge detection and edge blending, including "Forced editing", where edges that have not been automatically detected can be manually selected.

  3. An intuitive user interface. Well-made tutorials are a bonus, but a well-designed UI is a must.

  4. Ability to detect blurred edges, and compensate by adding a degree of transparency. This is called "intelligent blending".

  5. Quick and responsive previews, so that a full rendering is not necessary every time you want to see the results of your work.

  6. Compatibility with tablets, including pressure sensitivity

  7. Global selection tools. This allows the editing of large sections of an image at once.

  8. Automatic lassoing of objects such as hair or trees, but allowing for editing by hand later.

  9. Good performance for objects with similar color to the background.

  10. Speed. While a program that runs slowly on a Pentium I computer cannot be blamed, the program should utilize dual core and multicore machines to their maximum.

  11. Compatibility with full-featured image editing software like Adobe Photoshop

  12. For convenience's sake, multiple OS compatibility

Masking software can make the process of selection and masking much easier for anyone performing photo editing tasks. The only cons are that purists may turn up their nose, and that the price tag above $100 pays off only for people who need a LOT of time saved.

Do hair cutouts while photo editing make you tear your own hair? Photo editing software has finally evolved to meet your needs. Try out this PhotoShop layer masking software that makes working with complex shapes a breeze.

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